Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I shall speak to Amendment 103. It is a slightly obscure amendment to probe, to some extent, the same issue. We on these Benches endorse Amendment 96 and the promotion of the independence of the sixth-form college and further education college sector. Given that, we would like to know a little more about the kinds of co-operation that are being developed. We understand that 43 sub-regional groups have now been agreed to. There is a six-stage process of agreement on the funding procedures and the way it moves forward. In the first stage, the YPLA will develop a national framework, working with local authorities. The second stage is that each local authority will assess supply and demand for 16 to 19 provision within its own area. The third stage is that each local authority will then take this assessment to one of the 43 sub-regional groups of local authorities of which it is a member, and the group will agree the commissioning plans within its sub-region. The fourth stage is that these plans will then have to be agreed at a regional planning group, which will scrutinise the local plans and ensure that they are coherent, can be funded within the regional budget and will deliver the 14 to 19 entitlement. The fifth stage is that the plans will go up to the YPLA, which will check them to ensure that they cohere and are affordable and then fund local authorities appropriately; if the YPLA agrees with them, it will send the funding back down to local authorities. The sixth stage is that the local authorities will then pass the funding on to colleges and other post-16 providers. The YPLA also has powers to act as a backstop authority and to intervene if it thinks there is a significant risk that local authorities have not developed robust commissioning plans. However, let us assume that they have developed what are seen to be robust commissioning plans. Given that this is supposed to be a demand-led system, can the Minister explain what would happen in instances where the predicted demand for learners agreed all the way up and down the regional and sub-regional groups, when aggregated together at the regional level, fails to match or meet the actual number of young people who turn up at a college or a school? With more players involved than in the current process involving only the single learning and skills councils, what would be the process for reassessing the funding allocation? What would be the role of the YPLA at this point? I have a further query relating to cross-regional issues. Apparently the Learning and Skills Council issued guidance about the recruitment of non-English domiciled students in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as follows: ""The LSC has reciprocal arrangements with the funding councils for Wales and Scotland for colleges and providers close to the borders. However, it is not expected that colleges and providers in England will recruit entire groups of learners from outside their local area. Such learners should be referred to the possibility of distance-learning or a Ufi programme delivered by their local provider or hub in Wales or Scotland. If the learning programme is not available through this route, permission to enrol the learners must be sought from the provider’s LSC partnership team"." In January, the Welsh Affairs Select Committee in the other place reported on a cross-border provision of further and higher education and described this LSC funding guidance as unhelpful and inappropriate and urged authorities to see access across borders as something to be encouraged. The Government, in their formal response to the committee, said: ""The guidance issued by the Learning and Skills Council … to further education colleges should not be seen as restrictive or as a deterrent to English colleges responding to the needs of Welsh or Scottish learners. Rather it supports our expectations that individual colleges will focus primarily on their local communities. Where such communities embrace such cross-border travel-to-learn or travel-to-work areas it is appropriate for those colleges to include these factors within their planning and their marketing strategies"." We would welcome clarification from the Minister as to whether new guidance from the DCSF will be issued to the sub-regional groups of the local authorities near the Welsh and Scottish borders. Will it make clear that they can recruit across the border, or will it try to deter such colleges from doing so? Perhaps the Minister can provide us with such clarification.